Teaching stuff

> Jonathanpeel

Et Plagieringseventyr. A site to share my resources for secondary English teaching.
10 Silver Arrows: Ideas to penetrate the armour of ingrained practice. One arrow, aimed at the right place…..that’s all it takes.

Silver Arrows? It’s very hard to change your practice. We’re all so busy, very often it is difficult to create space to fully explore a set of ideas and to deliberately adapt our teaching routines to absorb something new. At the same time, we’re often bombarded with initiatives and issues to address. It can be overwhelming. There isn’t a definitive research-informed list; I’m presenting a set of ideas that I think make good Silver Arrow contenders based on my own teaching. 1. Effective classroom management is multi-faceted but if you can do this, you can do anything.

Signal: You give the agreed signal for attentionPause: You wait, adopting an assertive stance and position in the room, scanning for eye contact;Insist: You insist on full attention. You now give the instruction or direction you want to give. (A Bill Rogers Top 10 Behaviour Strategies) 2. What were you saying in your pair? 3. What does the graph tell us?
Sutton Trust - Many popular teaching practices are ineffective, warns new Sutton Trust report.

Lavish praise for students is among seven popular teaching practices not supported by evidence, according to a new Sutton Trust report which reviews over 200 pieces of research on how to develop great teachers.

What Makes Great Teaching, by Professor Rob Coe and colleagues at Durham University, warns that many common practices can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research. Examples include using praise lavishly, allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves, grouping students by ability and presenting information to students based on their “preferred learning style”. On the other hand, some other teaching approaches are supported by good evidence of their effectiveness. Many of these are obvious and widely practiced, but others are at odds with common assumptions. Previous Sutton Trust research shows that the quality of teaching is by far the biggest factor within schools that impacts on the achievement of children from poorer backgrounds.
All products – designthinkingagency. How to use a semicolon. Robert Frost. Reform the Death Star of Ofsted, or it's time to blow it up. - Tom Bennett - Blog - Tom Bennett.

It was a year ago, at the London Festival of Education, that I listened to Michael Wilshaw, the Commissar of Ofsted, promise a packed room that from then on, the inspectors wouldn't be looking for a particular teaching style; that what was sought was, instead, evidence that children were learning, however it happened.

The Dementors of recent history, with their prescriptions and prejudices, were to be retrained and taught to smile. This mattered, because many commentators, myself included had long noted that Ofsted had become a lash and a rack of good teaching, rather than an instrument of accountability. It had gone from microscope to centrifuge; it affected rather than observed the school experiment. Schools had evolved to anticipate its caprices, rather than rely on professional judgement and experience. An industry of consultants sprang up to sate the anxious appetites of school leaders, paid to read the entrails, runes and bones of the Ancient Ones.
Www.nationalcollege.org.uk/cm-mc-lt-op-westburnham-curriculum-policy.pdf. Schools Mace 2011 Debate Three. Targets, targets, targets. Target: Make a table.

So, you need wood, screws, a saw, screwdriver, a tape measure and spirit level. All the raw materials you need are laid out. Setting to work, you know that as long as you put everything together properly, follow the instructions and give yourself the time, you will end up with a table. But hang on, the wood has been taken off by someone else to be given some extra intensive wood training. The screwdriver decides that it is no longer interested in turning screws into wood and decides that it would rather just sit and watch.

And if I had a viable exit strategy I might have taken it further. Note the end of that sentence: a young, talented teacher with so much to offer the world feels like he has no ‘viable exit strategy’. There are thousands of teachers up and down the country feeling the same thing. I should know. You should go and read Mark’s post. On top of the ridiculous workload teachers like Mark experience each year, he notes that the benefits aren’t exactly stellar: At the same time I am told that I will have to work for another 36 years. I’ve been out of the classroom for just over two years now. Although I would say this, I think we need a review of what we’re doing when it comes to schools.
Education Blog Awards. Expert Advice & Support for Teachers - TES Forums.